All Our Relations: Pagans and the more-than-human world.

For aware Pagans the Sacred encompasses us all, rivers and mountains, oceans and deserts, grasses and trees, fish and fungi, birds and animals. Understanding the implications of what this means and how to experience it first hand involves our growing individually and as a community well beyond the limits of this world-pathic civilization. All Our Relations exists to help fertilize this transition.

A Meditation on Death in several parts. Part 1

Early Fall is upon us, and the year’s Wheel turns from harvest into the darkening time leading to Samhain. This reminds us that one great distinction between modern NeoPaganism and most contemporary religions is our different relationship to death. For the monotheistic traditions death entered into the world as a consequence of sin. As I understand Buddhism, death is one of many forms taken by suffering, and suffering is evidence something is amiss with embodied existence. The secular modern ‘religion’ of scientism hopes someday to enable us to achieve immortality, perhaps as consciousness encased within a computer.

Today many of the deceased are painted to look as if they are still alive, ‘sleeping,’ and their bodies buried in ornate caskets with comfy cushions to protect them for as long as possible from finding physical oneness with the earth. We mourn the loss of loved ones but we mourn from within a different context than do those who see death as a misfortune.

We NeoPagans generally honor the powers of death with a Sabbat, Samhain. If two Sabbats are more symbolically important to our practice than any others, they are Beltane and Samhain. Separated by 6 months, they honor the two greatest themes of physical existence: life and death.

I think this distinction between most of our traditions and so many others is worth thinking about at length. Here is one thread in several parts.

It starts with a story.

Many years ago the American Association of Religions held their annual conference in San Francisco. A friend from Boston University flew out to attend, and invited me to come down and visit him while he was there. A mutual friend was also “womaning” a Boston Buddhist reception there, and John suggested we visit her as well.

“Great, see you there.” I replied.

When we walked into the Buddhist reception room there was an elaborate buffet, half of which had vegetarian food, as one might expect. The other half included meat. I heard a good deal of quiet muttering among some of the people visiting, objecting to the meat.

Hearing this righteous muttering, I walked over to the cuts of beef and piled my plate with it much higher than I normally would. I have a great deal of respect for vegetarians. I might even become one some day. But I have an almost irrepressible urge to poke self-righteous ones.

I ended up talking with a Buddhist scholar from somewhere up in Oregon. I’ll never know whether or not he noticed what was on my plate. Perhaps he deliberately averted his gaze from the carnage. But he did tell me “Eventually the meat eaters will rise to the vegetarians’ level of spiritual discernment.” Or something like that.

“Into my hands he is delivered,” I thought to myself.

“Think about the hunter who gets up in the morning, goes off into the woods, and shoots a deer. He brings it back to feed his family, but otherwise leaves the woods pretty much alone.

“Now think about the farmer. He gets up in the morning, goes into the woods, and chops the trees down to make a new field, destroying the homes of countless animals. Then he digs up the stumps, destroying the homes of more. In both cases the land outside the field is already occupied, so these displaced beings either die, or take over someone else’s home, and they die.

“Now the farmer plows the field, destroying the homes of more animals, and killing many. After planting his seeds he must protect his seedlings and later his crop from birds, rabbits, deer, and insects. Maybe he uses bio-controls, and so insects he likes kill the insects he doesn’t, but the birds, rabbits, and deer may not be so lucky. They just might get shot.

“All so the vegetarian will know there is no blood on his plate of spinach.”

He huffed and puffed, but had no response. I was right, and he knew it.

Some people to whom I later described this encounter responded that the vileness of factory farming justified vegetarianism and condemned eating meat. But neither follow. The brutality of factory farming justifies never eating meat raised that way, and I don’t. But after this decision whether to eat meat at all remains an open question.

To live means to bring death to some and to benefit from the deaths of others. There might be good reasons for being a vegetarian. In my opinion when you do certain kinds of spiritual work there are very good reasons for doing so. But removing oneself from causing the deaths of others in order to live is not one of them.

Of course we can minimize the deaths we bring, but just how far should we go? What does “minimize” really mean? Even vegans drive cars or ride in trains and busses which hit a certain number of birds, turtles, dogs, cats, skunks, raccoons, and so on. The list is long. The cotton in our clothes came from fields where “pests” met untimely ends by one means or another. Our buildings have windows and many a bird meets its end flying into one. The list is long.

I am not saying that causing death is not a major ethical issue. It is. But we must think about it clearly. Simply saying “Death is bad and I will not kill.” is not an option for us, (or anyone else for that matter).

Gus diZerega is a Third Degree Elder in Gardnerian Wicca. He studied closely with Timothy White who later founded Shaman’s Drum magazine, and also studied Brazilian Umbanda for six years under Antonio Costa e Silva.Dr. diZerega has published widely on the social sciences in the academic press as well as on spirituality. His second book Pagans and Christians: The Personal Spiritual Experience won the Best Nonfiction of 2001 award from The Coalition of Visionary Resources. His third, coauthored with Philip Johnson, is Beyond the Burning Times: A Pagan and a Christian in Dialogue. His art frequently appeared in Shaman’s Drum, and the ecological journals Wild Earth, and The Trumpeter.DiZerega combines a formal academic training in Political Science with decades of work in Wicca and shamanic healing.His newest book, Faultlines: The Culture War and the Return of the Divine Feminine, received a 'silver' award by the Association of Independent Publishers for 2014.

Comments

Amy Wolf
Tuesday, 04 September 2012

Nice of Witches and Pagans to use my real name after asking for a username...ok... Here's my comment: I wish those of us concerned about how many animals, birds, plants we affect by our eating habits would really meditate, pray and listen to the Gods as to what needs to be done. The problem is so much bigger than any one of us. I despair daily of what good my actions might do in a world where there is so much plastic that we will all drown in it one day; in a world where SUVs idle in PCC parking lots so that their owners(who just bought organic truffles in a massive boat of plastic) might talk on the cellphone with the radio/air conditioner/heat on. If there are not systems-wide, cultural-wide large changes, then my personal choices will have little effect. In the 70s we believed in the 100th monkey and that we could convert everyone to vegetarianism and solve the problem. Those were simpler days. I despair sometimes of what to hope for...although the gods tell me there is hope for us on this planet. I wish we could all get past trying to be "good" about what we eat and consume to where we are thinking strategically about how to get to the safe place for the planet we are really trying to get to-but that's so large it's hard to think about.

If you don't want your real name associated with this site, change your name under edit user profile. Never enter your real name on any web site when you do not want your real name to be associated with that site.

There may be an illusion that your name is protected, but any number of events, like site hacking, can cause the illusion to fail.

I'm sorry there was any mis-understanding, I will look into improving the the labels to make this more clear.

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Theresa Wymer
Tuesday, 04 September 2012

The arguments you brought up about farming are also maintained by Jainists, who do not plow for exactly that reason.

Theresa- That is why I used "scientism" - the faith/ideology that all knowledge comes from science and can be demonstrated or discovered through strictly scientific methodologies. Many first rate scientists do not believe in scientism.

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Amy Wolf
Tuesday, 04 September 2012

Hi Alan: Thanks. Congenital honesty, a flaw esp in wicca and online. Usually when there's an option of "username", that's what gets posted. If it bugs me enough I'll go change it.

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Natalie Reed
Tuesday, 04 September 2012

Gus - couldn't agree more. Humans were built to eat meat, too much evidence to go into here, but in a nutshell, we wouldn't be human if we didn't. Anyway, yes, it is what kind of meat that matters most, how it was raised, treated, etc. We need to be more mindful of how our food is produced and managed.